Brian Larue had made the trip from Farmington beneath the pouring rain, answering as frankly as he could the questions posed by his daughter, who wanted to know all about what had been going on at Boundary during her absence. And he was exhausted. If he’d had the choice, he would have stretched out under the table, on the soft carpet patterned with diamonds, and he would have let the rain lull him to sleep, but there was this woman facing him with a wet plastic bonnet on her head, Flora Tanguay, old Pat’s daughter-in-law, waving her arms and discharging a frenzied torrent of words. She’d knocked at the McBains’ door just as he was dropping Emma off at the Duchamps, and had burst into the dining room with that ridiculous turquoise bonnet whose ties, tightly knotted into a bow, tripled her double chin.
It’s him, she repeated, flapping her arms, it’s him, Pete Landry, and Michaud had to raise his voice to calm her a little. Have a seat, he ordered, pointing to a chair. Flora Tanguay obeyed, a bit confused, while accepting a glass of water offered by Cusack. While she took off her bonnet and arranged her hair, ill at ease with the three pairs of eyes focused on her, she appraised the furniture, of a quality she could never afford, the highly polished candleholders adorning the buffet, casting their silver shimmer onto porcelain while the guests shared their Sunday lunch, roast beef or roast chicken, and she was ashamed of her intrusion. With the end of one of her sleeves she tried to wipe away the drops fallen from her bonnet onto the table, but she only managed to spread them out, her jacket’s waterproof material unable to absorb the liquid that the table’s varnish couldn’t soak up either. Aware of her clumsiness, she sighed, seeking a bit of sympathy in the gaze of Cusack, the courteous policeman with the hazel eyes, then she began again, it’s him, it’s Pete Landry, rubbing her plump hands over the streaks formed by the water until her skin emitted a faint squeak on contact with the wood, dry at last.
Tell us what you know, Cusack asked softly, and Flora Tanguay’s shyness disappeared. She opened her mouth and a rush of words came pouring out like a dammed-up torrent suddenly free to sweep down on an arid world. Whenever he could, Larue interrupted her to translate, and then she was off again, throwing the past in with the present, reviving the dead and mixing her own blood in with that of the victims, blood flowing from her womb after the hysterectomy that had prevented her from spending the summer at Bondrée as she usually did. She’d arrived the day before, and had only learned about the dramas at noon today. Right away she knew, right away she saw the connection, those murders were the work of Pete Landry, a monster whose first victim was a poor little dog, Sugar Baby, caught in a trap the same way, a maniac who’d been declared dead when the body found in his cabin was so decomposed that it was unrecognisable. At the time no one bothered to check the fingerprints or the shape of the skeleton, as one would today. Landry was recognised beneath his blackened flesh, distended, ready to burst, the corpse was linked to the shack but Flora Tanguay always had her doubts, which increased when the wind blew over Bondrée and hands scraped at her window panes. Zaza Mulligan’s and Sissy Morgan’s deaths confirmed these doubts: Pierre Landry wasn’t dead. Pierre Landry had come back to take his revenge on everything beautiful.
During this whole account, the three men sitting near her were sending each other meaningful looks, not knowing how to stem this renewed deluge nor how to get rid of this woman without triggering a hysterical episode. Luke Stanfield saved them by bursting into the room to set down in front of Michaud a clear plastic bag inside of which you could see a thick mass of blonde hair. What the hell! exclaimed Michaud, signing to Stanfield that he remove the damned bag. There was a witness in the room whom he didn’t want too involved in the affair, but Flora Tanguay had seen the hair and gone white in the face. Pointing her finger at the bag, she started to scream, describing the pelts hanging on Landry’s walls, piled up on his filthy cot, just like that horrible thing in the plastic bag, and Michaud felt his own blood drain from his face. That madwoman thought, as he did, that the killer was a man of the woods, the difference being that he wasn’t so crazy as to believe that Landry had risen from the flames engulfing his shack in order to seek vengeance. He’d heard enough, and he wanted this Flora Tanguay gone from the premises. Va chez vous, speak avec nobody, he told her with a wink of his eye, as if in confidence, not caring whether he was butchering his ancestors’ language, then he handed Cusack the keys to his official car so he could drive her back. Meanwhile, he’d have to talk to Luke Stanfield.
A wave of pain fanned out through Michaud’s head when he looked at the bag and saw there was an earring still caught in the hair, Zaza Mulligan’s earring, a tear, a drop of pink rain, which the little Duchamp girl, recruited by Sissy Morgan, had found in the forest. Sissy Morgan was wearing her friend’s jewel as one wears a mourning ring, as one dons the old clothes of a lover who’s disappeared. That realisation intensified his rage, but also the tenderness he felt for the young girls, Sissy, Zaza, Esther.
Where did you find this?
And Stanfield described to him the heap of boards piled up in a vacant lot where the woodcutters’ road began. Apparently the land belonged to Gilles Ménard, the man who’d found Zaza Mulligan. Ménard had torn down his old shed at the beginning of the summer, and stacked the wood up there. Stanfield’s team was still searching through the pile of boards, in case there was more to find, the hunting knife for instance, which was responsible for Sissy Morgan’s hair ending up in the bag.
The first time Michaud had met this Ménard, he’d immediately struck him off the list of suspects. He was too overwhelmed, too stunned to be the killer of a young girl whom he’d discovered, he said, by chance. But was it by chance? His name was turning up too frequently in this investigation, always where blood was involved, the blood of a fox or a young girl, and hair cut off, and limbs torn away. Of course, anyone could have hidden Sissy Morgan’s hair under the pile of boards, but he wanted to know what Ménard thought. We’re going to Ménard’s, he said to Stanfield and Larue, just as Cusack returned, shaken by Flora Tanguay’s verbal frenzy.
As the Ménards lived on the bay, they’d have to take the car, even if Michaud would have preferred to walk, thereby putting off the moment when he’d have to confront Ménard. He always felt that way when things began to accelerate and he stumbled on a factor that might bring an investigation to a head. He was scared stiff, afraid of making a mistake, or finding that the killer, the thief, the rapist, or the swindler, was his wife’s nephew, his neighbour’s son, his dentist or garage man, afraid of losing his grip and beating him to a pulp, or, on the contrary, backing off and apologising. During the trip no one uttered a word, no one tried to say anything about Stanfield’s discovery. They all felt weighed down by the same apprehension, by the prospect of gazing into the eyes of a murderer. They all thought the nightmare might be drawing to a close, but there would be no happy ending, the awakening would not free them from the pall this nightmare cast, from its rank and fetid aftertaste.
Jocelyne Ménard was altering an old pair of pants and listening to the radio when she heard the car parking in the driveway. The engine’s growl superimposed itself on Frank Sinatra’s voice singing Something’s Gotta Give, as, humming, she lowered the volume. Seeing the police car, she went out on the porch immediately, as women do when they’re welcoming trouble as well as joy, incapable of waiting for the one to grope its way towards them or the other to throw itself into their arms. With what was happening in Bondrée, a visit from the police did not bode well, but she graciously invited the men inside, telling them not to bother removing their wet shoes, as she’d be washing the floor in any case.
At a sign from Michaud, Larue informed her that they wanted to talk to her husband. As he had gone out for an hour or two, Michaud immediately assumed that Ménard had left on one of his walks deep into the woods. But he was wrong. Ménard no longer went into the woods. He was afraid of the hazy light that could turn a fox lying on a bed of moss into a half-animal, half
-human creature. Since he’d found Zaza Mulligan, since he’d stumbled on the disembowelled fox on the slopes of Moose Trap, since he’d taken part in the discovery of Sissy Morgan, Ménard just mooned around the cottage like a lost dog. At most, he sometimes ventured onto the woodcutters’ road that went up behind the cottage. Too much blood, he’d mumbled to his wife, too many pictures filtering through the green light and giving the spruce buds the taste of rusted metal. No. Gilles had simply gone to buy some materials to rebuild the cabin, the old shed he’d torn down in June. He wanted to use his two weeks of vacation to finish some work. The police were lucky. Normally, he’d be in town, at his job.
Michaud was lucky indeed, because Boundary lost most of its men as of dawn on Monday mornings, except for vacationers and retirees. He’d imagined the scene more than once, the women in nightgowns embracing their husbands on the doorstep, car doors slamming, engine noises fading into the distance, then calm returning to the little community where all you heard was women’s voices. An idyllic society, they said, where a male presence was not needed for the rain to keep filling the wells with water, where women easily learned to deal with a lawnmower, a hammer, or a chain saw, far from the confusing world of the opposite sex.
He was unhappy at not being able to talk to Ménard right away, but he’d wait. He sent Stanfield onto the property, and asked Cusack to go with him, to see what was going on with that pile of boards, and he sat on the wide porch with Larue, despite Jocelyne Ménard’s insistence that they stay inside where it was dry. But Michaud didn’t want to get too close to Ménard’s wife, in case things took a bad turn. He preferred to stay with the rain, whose spray would perhaps make him feel like it was washing away the thick layer of grime that had built up on the old cop’s skin. He was telling Larue that this investigation would probably be his last, when Ménard’s car drew in near the cottage. Immediately a little girl in a yellow raincoat jumped out and ran to Michaud to show him the plush kitten her father had bought her. Look, mister, he’s called Pixie, you can pet him, but Michaud understood nothing of what the child was saying, no more than he understood what he was doing on the porch of a man he was getting ready to destroy.
Sitting on a leatherette hassock that crackled every time he moved, Gilles Ménard held the plastic envelope in his hands, rigid, as if inside it were a child’s remains. On a low table there sat another envelope, this one containing a bloodstained shirt that one of Stanfield’s men had just fished out from under the pile of boards. Cusack had immediately brought it to his chief and Ménard confirmed that it was indeed one of his shirts, because of the last button, at the bottom, different from the others. He hadn’t said a word after that, too shaken at the sight of the hair, a blonde foxtail, cut off by a madman. In front of him, Michaud, Larue, and Cusack waited while Jocelyne, his wife, begged him to talk. Say something, Gilles, tell them that this can’t be.
The atmosphere in the tiny living room into which they were crammed was as sombre as that of those long hallways down which condemned prisoners are led, their wrists and feet chained. The heat was such that the men had to mop their brows with their shirtsleeves. The rain had not eased the humidity, and they heard it rattling on the roof, heightening the oppressive silence. Only Gilles Ménard was motionless, letting the sweat run down his face, indifferent to the salt burning the corners of his eyes. He looked at the window, where drops of condensation were tracing paths that snaked left or right in response to some obscure resistance, a bit of dust perhaps, or an oily fingerprint easing the water around its circumference.
Take Marie to the Duchamps’, he told his wife finally, in a low voice. Inside his head, a sequence of words, always the same, mixed with his incredulity, not in front of Marie, not in front of the little one, not in front of my angel, then he gave Michaud back the bag containing Sissy Morgan’s hair.
Lost in thought, he heard Marie say to him, see you soon Pappy, I’m going to play with Millie. Raising his eyes, he saw Marie hand in hand with Jocelyne, her face serious, darkened by the presence of all those adults looking equally solemn, and he wanted to throw himself into her arms and hug her until the nightmare was over, but he didn’t want to cry in front of her or wet the hood of her raincoat with tears that would never dry. See you soon, my angel, he replied, managing to draw from the love the child inspired in him a smile born from the stuff of real smiles, I love you, then the girl went away with her mother, leaving him alone with men who had to settle among themselves some man-to-man business.
The shirt, he finally managed to say, that’s the one I took off to put over Zaza Mulligan. That’s the one I was wearing that day, but I’m not the one who hid it. Why would I have done that?
That was the answer Michaud expected. Why hide an object that doesn’t incriminate you? Either Ménard was a damned good liar, clever enough to have orchestrated the discovery of Zaza Mulligan’s body, or someone else hid that cursed garment, but who, for Christ’s sake, and when, how, why? The hypothesis was absurd, because it supposed that the killer had returned to Zaza while Ménard was racing down Snake Hill to go and knock, white-faced, at Sam Duchamp’s door, or that he was still in the vicinity when Ménard was covering up the young girl’s body. But good God, why take the shirt? Michaud didn’t understand, and Ménard neither, he was turning himself inside out trying to remember if the damned shirt was still there when he came back to the woods with Duchamp and the police. He was so disoriented at that moment that he’d forgotten about the shirt. Duchamp hadn’t said anything about it either, but it wasn’t his shirt. In any case, Duchamp was as shaken as he was. When he’d seen Zaza under the floodlights he’d given Ménard a fright, looking like he was going to pass out and that they’d both find themselves in a dead faint, arm in arm, in that mushy place men go when they’ve had all they can take of being a man. I don’t know what happened to that damn shirt, he repeated, but one thing is sure, it’s someone around here who took it, someone who knew my property and wanted to pin Zaza Mulligan’s murder on me. I don’t see any other explanation.
That could make sense, Michaud thought. If this mysterious and hypothetical unknown’s purpose was to incriminate Ménard, he’s succeeded, because everything points in his direction. If there was only the hair, you could think that anyone might have put it there, but the shirt led them straight to Ménard. Sorry, Menarde, I have to take you in, I have no choice.
Hearing those words, Ménard wanted to slam his fist into the wall, just so as to hurt, just so as to feel something other than this curious numbness that weakened his legs and thickened his tongue, as if he’d just fallen from a rooftop into a nightmare already well under way, but he obeyed. When he got up, the others all lowered their heads, Michaud, Cusack, Larue, feeling obscurely guilty about the situation, not able to be there before the harm arrived, to head it off, to disable the machinery that in the end grinds us all up, one after the other. They experienced no sense of achievement, no feeling of relief. All they saw was Ménard’s distress, the distress of all men unable to walk side by side without one cretin pushing the other face down in the dirt so the herd can walk over him. No one was proud of what was happening in that humid cottage, no one relished his role, but no one would have traded places with Ménard, who would never recover from his fall, guilty or not.
Michaud placed a hand on Ménard’s shoulder to lead him out, and at the same time to have him feel the warmth of another man, one of those who walked tall and took no pleasure in tripping up his neighbour. Just as they were leaving, Jocelyne Ménard drove into the cottage yard in their metallic blue Ford, its tyres squealing under the driving rain. She leapt out of the car and ran to throw herself into her husband’s arms, limp arms, inert, barely able to graze her lower back. As they were easing the suspect into the police car’s back seat, she began to shout, but Ménard wouldn’t remember what she was trying to tell him, only her face, her outrageously blue eyes sinking into the darkness of her cries. And the rain, the rain creeping rou
nd the first furrows on her cheeks.
They think it’s Gilles, Jocelyne Ménard whispered to my mother, can you keep Marie, then she left at a run, her beautiful white blouse all wet, her lovely blonde hair half undone. Twenty minutes later she was back, her skirt and blouse even wetter, glued to her thighs and her stomach. Mama made her tea and gave her a towel, but Jocelyne Ménard, the towel over her shoulders, couldn’t drink. Every time she brought the cup to her lips she was seized with hiccups and started again to cry, clouding the mirrors, the silvered surfaces of certain objects, the water pitcher, my mother’s compact way back in her bedroom, everything that reflected the world and her red eyes. Kleenexes piled up on the table, forming a sad white little mountain that reminded me of those eternally snowed-in summits where the sun is cold all year round. Unable to console Jocelyne Ménard, my mother took extreme measures. She brought out the Dutch gin and filled two mustard jars right to the tips of the red diamonds that ringed them round.
You could hear Marie and Millie in my room putting on ladies’ voices and telling stories about their babies, whose diapers they had to change, and whom they had to bathe. I would have given up my whole collection of Bazooka Joe jokes to be in their place, patting my doll’s behind while covering it generously with talcum powder, but after she had surprised us in my smoke-filled cabin my mother had kept Emma and me in the living room, where we pretended to read Lucky Luke without turning the pages, totally stunned by Gilles Ménard’s arrest and by the suffering of his wife, who swore every ten seconds that Gilles hadn’t done it. Gilles Ménard couldn’t even stick a worm onto a fishhook without feeling sick to his stomach, he couldn’t even set a mouse trap, Jocelyne Ménard had told my mother at the beginning of summer, he couldn’t even set a mouse trap, so how could he have massacred two girls? It didn’t hold water, and the only thing I could think was that Gilles Ménard was maybe like Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde, whom I’d discovered over the winter in an old film starring Spencer Tracy, with the face of a poodle on one side and a bulldog on the other. But that didn’t work either. A bulldog’s face is too big not to stick out a bit behind that of a poodle.
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